Page 16 of Property of the Bikers

I pick up the sandwich.

Chapter Eight

CADE

The bar is almost empty by the time I come back through it.

Hayes and Cutter are still at the far table, but the card game is done, the chips put away, just two men with drinks in front of them, talking about something low enough that I can’t hear the words from the door. They look up when I come in, and I give them a nod, and they go back to their conversation. Cole is stacking chairs at the near end of the room, working methodically from left to right, lifting each one and setting it up without rushing. He straightens when he sees me.

“Leave those,” I tell him. “Get some sleep.”

He puts the chair he’s holding down on the floor instead of up on the table. “Yes, sir.”

He disappears down the back hallway. I stand in the middle of the bar for a moment and listen to the building. The refrigerator unit behind the counter is cycling on. The wind is picking up outside, rattling the sign above the front door the way it does when the temperature drops fast. Hayes says something that makes Cutter laugh quietly.

A Thursday night in Montana winding itself down.

I push through the back door and cross the yard toward the offices. The cold hits immediately, the deep, dry cold that comes off the mountains at this time of year and means business in a way the daytime cold doesn’t. My breath fogs in front of me. The perimeter lights are on, throwing long yellow lines across the gravel, and I can see two of Ghost’s men doing a slow circuit along the north fence line, their flashlights moving in the dark.

Rotation is running.

I go into the office and close the door behind me.

It’s a small room. Desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet that needs a new lock, a shelf of binders going back twenty-two years. There’s a lamp on the desk because the overhead light has a flicker that I’ve been meaning to fix for six months and haven’t. I pull off my cut and hang it on the back of the door, and sit down.

The desk is disordered. A topographic map of the compound and surrounding land is folded open on one side, coffee ring stained at the corner. A stack of papers that Reeve left after church: the financial monitoring reports, the LLC search results, the preliminary profile on Viktor Sokolov, already running to four pages, and will be longer by morning. My phone face up beside the lamp, screen dark.

I pull the papers toward me and start reading.

Reeve writes reports the way he does everything else, efficiently and without wasted words, and I’ve been reading his work long enough that I move through it fast. The shell company structure. The Cyprus attorney. The Bratva fingerprints three layers down from the surface. The brother Dmitri, flagged and noted, a variable without a clear function yet.

I read the email chain transcription last.

Closing the maternal loop post-delivery. Risk mitigation confirmed.

I’ve read those words three times tonight already, and they still land the same way. Not with anger. I stopped making decisions from anger a long time ago because anger is imprecise, and imprecision costs you things you don’t get back. What they land with is the specific cold clarity that comes when you understand exactly what kind of man you’re dealing with.

The kind who writes that sentence and then goes home and has dinner.

I put the papers down and lean back in the chair.

The lamp makes a warm circle on the desk surface, and outside that circle, the office is in shadow, and outside the office, the compound is running its night protocol, and somewhere in the main house, Mira Sokolov is in a room she didn’t choose with rules she agreed to because she had no better options.

I make a note to have someone check whether the heating in the main house guest room is working properly. It runs cold in that wing in winter, and nobody has thought to mention it because nobody has been sleeping there.

I get up and go to the small cabinet in the corner where someone, at some point, thought it was a good idea to put a coffee maker. The pot is empty. I fill it, run it, and stand at the cabinet waiting for it because standing is better than sitting back down and pretending I’m not waiting for something I can’t name yet.

I’m going through the perimeter rotation schedule when my laptop chimes.

Encrypted channel. The sender identification runs through two relay points before it resolves, which tells me someone who knows what they’re doing sent this, someone who has done this before and knows how to make a message look like it came from nowhere.

I open it.

Mr. Mercer. I believe you are currently hosting someone who belongs in my care. I understand the circumstances of her arrival may have presented a particular picture. I would invite you to consider that the picture has context you are not currently aware of. A quiet resolution benefits us both. Return her, and this matter closes cleanly. I have no interest in complications.

I read it twice.

Then I sit back and look at it for a moment.